Easy Red 2 Realism Overhaul v1.0.8

1.0.8 - 2026-07-27

Easy Red 2 compatibility: version 2.0.8 Stable, Steam public branch build 24420558 (July 27, 2026).

• Quick Setup now offers Quality, Balanced, and Large Battle performance presets built from the settings that scale most directly with battlefield load: distant animation quality, artillery round count, smoke and dust lifetime, supplemental blast and fragmentation work, penetration depth and added ricochets, retained decals, simultaneous audio, and diagnostics. Quality restores the recommended defaults; Balanced keeps every gameplay system with lighter expensive effects; Large Battle keeps the core AI and fire-safety systems while cutting supplemental battlefield work and enabling frame-sliced garbage collection. A preset only stages ordinary settings, so every value remains visible and individually editable before Apply; startup audio-capacity changes are clearly identified as taking effect on the next launch.
• Restored the proven 1.0.5 large-battle stutter fix without restoring its mixed-mod failure: transient base-game objects no longer build an enormous managed finalizer backlog, but UnityEngine objects and objects injected by this or another plugin are left on Il2CppInterop's normal lifetime path. A wrapper that another mod still holds remains live and is never reclaimed.
• A lightweight objective coordinator now spreads AI attackers across as many simultaneous objectives as their available infantry squads can support, while keeping enough squads together for part of each attack to use alternating offset approach angles. Defenders place a squad on every active objective before distributing surplus squads, prefer intact cover clusters within their separate defensive sectors, and spread into individual cover posts instead of repeating the same open-ground kneeling formation around the hold point. They can also shift one surplus squad toward an objective whose capture progress is changing without leaving another objective empty. Individual defenders occupy and validate protective fighting positions inside those areas even before contact. The coordinator uses Easy Red 2's native synchronized attack and hold orders, never stages or delays an assault, and leaves player-led and mission-scripted squads untouched. The system can be switched off in the new AI / Objectives settings category.
• Targetless AI infantry now check promptly for nearby enemies they can actually see between the game's normal staggered scans, and a new closer threat can preempt an unrelated unconfirmed contact, while still waiting through the configured human reaction time before engaging. The recommended close-target delay is now 0.15 seconds and the point-blank delay is 0.1 seconds. Once a close target is confirmed, riflemen and machine gunners immediately interrupt an objective or cover move and regain fire permission without waiting for the shared tactical decision queue; only eligible close-range submachine guns retain moving fire. The configured close-quarters accuracy bonus also stays stronger through typical room and building distances before returning smoothly to native spread at the range limit.
• AI soldiers now call out personally confirmed targets to nearby friendly AI within a configurable 5-50 m radius (15 m by default). Recipients receive only the frozen last-known position after a short voice delay: they must stop before turning toward it, and still need their own line of sight and normal target-acquisition time before aiming or firing.
• Infantry directly fired upon now retain the attacker's last-known direction for at least 15 seconds and for five seconds longer than the configured visual target memory, so recovering from suppression does not immediately erase the danger and send them through the same firing lane. This coarse memory never grants aim or fire permission against an unseen enemy.
• Stationary AI carrying an explosive grenade can now throw at a fresh, personally confirmed last-known enemy position after direct sight is lost. The remembered position stays frozen, and the attempt is allowed only once per observation when range, cooldown, blast clearance, and the full arcing throw path are safe; moving soldiers are never turned for it.
• Infantry no longer treat barbed wire, razor wire, or chain-link screens as ballistic cover or as blocked firing lanes. Deliberate cover moves also favor a substantially safer nearby trench, building position, or solid barrier over a merely closer marginal obstruction; the conservative native-cover fallback now applies only when the material truly could not be classified.
• Suppression no longer makes infantry go prone under a nearby solid ceiling. Pinned and recovering soldiers in roofed fighting positions stay crouched so they can keep using indoor firing lanes, while exposed soldiers outdoors can still drop prone.
• Suppressed attackers released by the maximum combat-halt deadline now crawl toward their objective while prone, including along a cover route they already selected. Native AI crawl movement is also left intact instead of being forced into a crouch.
• Defensive infantry now spread more assertively across equivalently protective firing positions instead of clustering around the first good node, while materially safer cover still wins. Dense cover geometry can no longer as easily hide an occupying soldier from the slot check. Native cover claims remain owned during the approach and are renewed for the full occupation; if two soldiers nevertheless reach one slot, the later claim is released and reselected. A new Minimum Soldier Separation slider, set to 2.5 m by default, controls both hard cover-slot separation and the short lateral correction made when settled squadmates overlap at a fighting halt; halted soldiers are rechecked periodically, try the other safe side when a trench wall blocks the first step, and stop the correction as soon as they arrive.
• Exposed infantry who confirm a distant threat now treat a bounded move into nearby protective cover as urgent even before that enemy fires, so the exposed-route filter and attack covering-fire wait no longer leave them fighting indefinitely in open ground. Suppressed soldiers still avoid a new exposed move, and a threat inside the existing immediate-fire distance is engaged from the current position instead.
• A cover route that circles outside a trench without getting closer to its selected slot now receives one fresh native path request. If it still cannot find a usable entrance, the soldier rejects that slot and returns to cover selection instead of treating endless movement as progress.
• Unsupported standing and crouched aim accumulates fatigue and feeds the game's own exhausted-aim sway; lowering the weapon, going prone, or using the native hold-breath input recovers or prevents it.
• First-person shadows now keep the ordinary third-person soldier model casting the local body-and-equipment silhouette while suppressing only the separate first-person arms and weapon models. Turning the option off still removes the whole local-player shadow in first person; other soldiers and third-person view remain unchanged.
• The lethal-headshot presentation remains headshot-only, but its black layer now belongs to Easy Red 2's native death panel and follows the game's death/respawn lifecycle directly. The death text remains visible, other deaths remain native, and both screen and audio are restored on respawn with a timed failsafe.
• The optional immersive world HUD hides floating squad and marked-unit icons only during the 3D world draw, preserving the same icons on the tactical map. Nearby AI squadmate and allied multiplayer names share one camera-aware world-label path without duplicate native labels, using each live soldier's native name anchor while multiplayer labels retain the player's Photon nickname. Contextual names now use one clean gold draw instead of a separate black shadow pass that made each name look duplicated.
• Dead multiplayer players get a visible Leave Squad & Redeploy action on the native squad-selection canvas, allowing them to leave their current infantry squad and return to Easy Red 2's deployment screen through the game's synchronized squad-leave operation.
• Ragdolls now inherit the soldier's actual movement velocity at death, with configurable inheritance and speed limits, so moving casualties no longer lose all forward momentum the instant ragdoll physics begins.
• The base game's separate seven-loop weapon-audio cutoff is raised to a configurable 24 automatic weapons by default. Handheld and mounted machine-gun loops are no longer stopped merely because seven other looped weapons are already active. Unity's local capacity is also raised once at startup to at least 256 audible voices and 512 virtual voices without lowering higher native values; all four controls are available on the Audio settings page.
• The F10 settings menu now starts AI tuning with five straightforward, centered 0.5x-1.5x Core Behavior sliders: Aggressiveness coordinates close-contact return fire, grenade frequency, and advance tempo; Accuracy scales AI weapon spread; Reaction Speed coordinates the three visual-acquisition delays; Awareness coordinates field of view, peripheral awareness, and visual contact memory; and Suppression Resistance coordinates crouch, prone, and recovery thresholds. Their 1.0x midpoint preserves the detailed settings, which remain independently adjustable. The complete playtested numeric configuration now ships as the recommended default, and each adjustable default has useful range on both sides except the intentional 0 m “rifle moving fire off” floor. Detailed controls remain with their owning categories; ordnance tuning stays in Battlefield and flight-model tuning stays in Aircraft.
• Machine-gun tracer retention now controls both handheld and mounted machine guns, including a true zero-tracer setting and a recommended roughly one-in-five default, while tank, cannon, and AA tracers remain native. Recommended tracers are dimmer, much thinner, and longer than the base game's thick, clean streaks; Visuals & Animation includes live brightness, thickness, and independent streak-length sliders, with 1.0x preserving each part of the base-game appearance. These presentation settings do not change projectile behavior.